HOLLYWOOD, California---This week the world marked the centenary of Peter Sellers, universally acclaimed as one of the greatest comic actors who ever lived. A century after his birth in Portsmouth, his name still evokes laughter and admiration. Sellers was more than just a comedian or an actor—he was a performer who seemed to vanish into every role he played, leaving behind characters so indelible that they outshone the man himself. From The Goon Show to the Pink Panther films, Sellers was unequalled in his brilliant portrayals.
Born Richard Henry in Portsmouth, his parents called him Peter after his older brother who was stillborn. They were variety performers and during one of their performances, at only two weeks old, Sellers made his stage debut, bursting into tears as Dickie Henderson carried him on stage.
Growing up in a world of vaudeville and music hall traditions, he absorbed comic timing and mimicry like a second language. But his childhood was not carefree. His father was often away, and his Jewish mother’s overwhelming presence left him both adored and smothered. As an only child, he spent much time alone. Later in life, Sellers would confess that he often felt like he had no real identity outside the characters he portrayed. Performance became both an escape and a mask.
He learned to play a number of instruments, including the ukulele, and was a fantastic drummer. According to Spike Milligan, Sellers was so brilliant on the drums he could have enjoyed a career as a jazz drummer. He played with a series of touring bands, as well as his father's quartet.
After WW2, during which he served in the RAF entertaining troops with sketches, Sellers broke into radio. There, with The Goon Show in the 1950s, he found fame alongside Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, and Michael Bentine. Surreal, anarchic, and wildly inventive, the programme redefined British comedy. Sellers’ vocal dexterity was extraordinary: week after week he conjured pompous officers, gibbering lunatics and working-class oddballs, each with a different timbre and rhythm.
In their absurdity, the Goons influenced many later performers, among them Monty Python and Rowan Atkinson. Dudley Moore, who often told me of his admiration for Sellers, modeled his performance in the movie 10, which rocketed him to international stardom, on a combination of Peter Sellers and Charlie Chaplin.
In 1958, Sellers released his first record album, The Best of Sellers, a collection of comic songs and sketches where he played a variety of comic characters. Produced by George Martin of later Beatles’ fame, the album reached number three in the UK. Two years later, Martin came up with Sellers’ novelty hit single Goodness Gracious Me, inspired by The Millionairess which teamed Sellers with Sophia Loren. The couple developed a close relationship during filming, culminating in Sellers declaring his love for her in front of his wife.
From the late 1950s, Sellers’ early films, including I’m All Right Jack (for which he won a British Academy Award) and The Mouse That Roared, showcased his ability to send up authority figures with sharp precision. Like the later Beyond the Fringe, his characters often embodied the absurdities of class and bureaucracy, skewering British institutions with wit and charm. And as he’d shown with the Goons, he was adept at performing multiple roles in his movies.
But it was his collaborations with American directors that vaulted him into international stardom. Stanley Kubrick cast him in Lolita (1962), where Sellers’ performance as the paedophilic playwright was unsettling and unforgettable. Kubrick said Sellers’ hilarious improvisations dazzled cast and crew, often ruining takes with suppressed laughter.
Sellers claimed that his relationship with the director was one of the most rewarding of his career. Kubrick admired him enormously and was in such awe of his unique talents that he cast him in his next film Dr Strangelove. It cemented Sellers’ reputation as a ‘mad genius’. Initially cast in one role, Sellers ended up portraying three: a nervous RAF officer, a stammering US President and the bizarre Dr Strangelove, a former Nazi scientist with uncontrollable mechanical limbs.
Sellers made each role entirely distinct, a feat of transformation that remains unmatched. The film was both hilarious and chilling, winning Sellers an Oscar nomination for Best Actor and making him the first actor ever to be nominated for playing three different roles in a single film. It cemented his reputation as one of cinema’s most daring comedic actors and many critics hail the character of Dr Strangelove as one of the greatest screen performances of all time.
While Dr. Strangelove earned Sellers critical reverence, it was Inspector Clouseau who made him a household name. In Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther, Sellers created a character who was bumbling and accident-prone. Clouseau’s mangled French accent, endless pratfalls, ridiculous confidence and sheer ineptitude delighted audiences worldwide. The film got a tepid reaction from the critics but was one of the top ten grossing movies of the year and led to five sequels.
Though huge box-office successes, Sellers often grew frustrated with the role. Yet, however ambivalent he felt, Clouseau became iconic. Decades later, the character remains etched into popular culture, a testament to Sellers’ physical comedy and his ability to stretch a gag beyond expectation.
In a 1962 interview for Playboy (who made him their first male cover two years later!), Sellers described how he prepared for his roles. “I start with the voice. I find out how the character sounds. It's through the way he speaks that I find out the rest about him. ... After the voice comes the looks of the man. I do a lot of drawings of the character I play. Then I get together with the makeup man and we sort of transfer my drawings onto my face. An involved process. After that I establish how the character walks. Very important, the walk. And then, suddenly, something strange happens. The person takes over. The man you play begins to exist.”
Following the first Panthers, he plunged into What’s New Pussycat as a perverted Austrian psychoanalyst. The film was the first screenwriting and acting credit for Woody Allen. Three years later, Sellers and Allen reteamed in Casino Royale which also starred Orson Welles. Sellers and Welles soon came to blows, with Sellers eventually demanding that the two should not share the same set. He left the film before his part was complete.
But his range extended far beyond slapstick. His most evocative role came in Being There, a poignant meditation on media, power, and innocence. As Chance the gardener, a simple-minded man whose vague political platitudes, lifted from television, are mistaken for profound wisdom, Sellers gave a haunting performance of astonishing restraint, patterning his childlike voice after his idol Stan Laurel and revealing a deep vulnerability beneath the clowning. He described the experience as humbling and powerful, with many critics regarding his Oscar-nominated performance as his finest work.
Sellers may have been a genius on screen but his personal life was far more turbulent. He was notoriously insecure, mercurial and often difficult to work with, capable of both charm and cruelty. At times, he fired crew members on whims or insisted on superstitious rituals before filming. Sellers’ three children spoke of his volatility but also of his tenderness. He was a man torn between brilliance and self-destruction, who confessed that he often felt he had no identity without a role to play.
His four marriages, including a high-profile union with Britt Ekland, were stormy and short-lived. During the sixties, clairvoyant and astrologer Maurice Woodruff was paid by film companies to steer the superstitious Sellers in the direction of their projects. Woodruff told Sellers someone with the initials 'B.E.' would become very prominent in his life. (He actually meant the film director Blake Edwards, hoping Sellers would register the link and accept the role of Inspector Clouseau in Edwards' second Pink Panther film.) But ironically, when Sellers saw a newspaper photo of stunning Swedish blonde Britt Ekland with the astrologically significant initials, he wangled a date. They married ten days after their first meeting.
In April 1980, Sellers played a Jewish con man in a series of commercials for Barclays Bank. In July, he planned to attend a reunion dinner with his Goon Show cohorts Milligan and Secombe. But earlier that day he collapsed from a heart attack and died two days later.
In Hollywood, I hastily interviewed several of his colleagues for a BBC obituary. Director Blake Edwards was still reeling from the shock and could barely contain his tears. Although some years earlier Sellers had said he’d had enough of Clouseau, he’d been persuaded back by Edwards and was set to reprise the role in Romance of the Pink Panther for MGM.
Blake told me the last time he saw Peter was in Gstaad where Sellers often resided and where Blake and wife Julie Andrews also owned a second home. One evening, the couple were dining in a posh restaurant when the maitre d’ came to their table to say Sellers had been refused admission after throwing a tantrum. Stepping out of the restaurant, Blake found Sellers standing silently outside in the freezing cold, knee-deep in snow pelting down on him. Wearing only a thick fur coat, he was stark naked underneath. Theirs had been a rollercoaster relationship causing Edwards to say: ‘If you went to an asylum and you described the first inmate you saw, that's what Peter had become, he was certifiable’.
After Sellers’ death, MGM asked the director to go ahead with Romance of the Pink Panther and offered the Clousseau role to Dudley Moore who turned it down. Edwards refused to do the film saying nobody else could step into Sellers’ shoes. Later, he decided to film Trail of the Pink Panther, incorporating clips and unseen footage from the earlier Panther movies. He followed that with another film compiled from previous footage which he titled The Curse of the Pink Panther
In a BBC interview at that time, he told me: “We have close to 1-1/2 hrs of footage that has never been seen before. We always shot more than we needed. So many wonderful things happened on the set and quite often we would end up with an entire sequence that just pushed the film that much too long. So we’d take out the complete sequence and hold onto it. We have flashes from all the first Pink Panthers.”
I asked if he had a favourite memory of the actor. He shook his head. “It’s not one memory, it’s a composite of all the laughter we had together. I don’t think there’s any one thing that I remember specifically that is my favourite. Mostly I remember the laughter. That I remember well!”
It was tragic when Sellers’ life was cut short at just 54 years old. He had suffered multiple heart attacks for years, but his death still stunned the entertainment world. The impact he had was enormous. His ability to disappear into characters paved the way for performers like Robin Williams, Jim Carrey, Steve Coogan, and Sacha Baron Cohen who were heavily influenced by his skills. Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean carries shades of Clouseau’s physical absurdity, while Eddie Murphy developed his dual acting skills as a child in imitation of Sellers whom he called his acting hero.
Critics routinely rank him among the greatest screen comedians, alongside Chaplin and Keaton. Sellers fused verbal wit, mimicry, and physical comedy, making him a performer of unmatched versatility and his work won him three Oscar nominations, 2 British Academy Awards and a slew of other global awards.
Even today, his characters continue to speak to us and evoke laughter and reflection. Dr. Strangelove still resonates uncomfortably in an age of global tension. Being There anticipates our media-saturated politics. And Clouseau, endlessly clumsy yet indomitable, remains joyously hilarious.
His legacy is timeless, his life an extraordinary performance. He gave the world laughter, insight, and unforgettable characters. And left us with a glorious treasure chest of movies, radio broadcasts and comedy albums. As a nostalgic reminder, I urge you to pick up a CD set of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s 1963 satirical recording of Fool Britannia, which teamed Sellers in live performance with Newley and then-wife Joan Collins. I guarantee you’ll be immersed in a great evening’s entertainment.
As we celebrate this centenary, we do not remember just an actor. We honor a chameleon, a satirist, a clown, and a poet of comedy. In his work, he left us with more than entertainment—he left us with mirrors to our own absurdity. That is why, a century later, Peter Sellers still makes us laugh, still makes us think, and is still a vital influence.